Monday, December 7, 2009

So 3.3 is coming. If MMO-champion is to be believed, and he's generally pretty good about it, it could very well be tomorrow. The current build on the PTR is labeled Release Candidate after all. That's pretty soon. And as with any patch, I look at its imminent arrival with a bit of apprehension.

After all, I'm not done with 3.2 yet. I still haven't beaten Anub'arak on ToGC. My feral druid alt isn't 80 yet. (I blame Dragon Age for the latter. I seriously have much love for that game. If it wasn't for that fact I run a raid guild I probably would have been online far less these last few weeks.)

But there is much to look forward to. There's the new raid instance, the new 5-mans, and I'm really looking forward to the new looking for group interface. It's going to be fantastic for alts and normal versions of level 80 instances (which for me would be primarily for alts). Maybe I'll actually do a real Gnomer run. Or not. Every time I've gone to that instance the run ended horribly. I have so many leveling alts. I don't play them all that often but that's partially because of the way I play them.

I like running instances. So if I'm looking to run an instance and I'm concerned they'll level out of soon, what I do is I rarely play them. I'll log in once in a blue moon and checking looking for group. If there isn't a group starting then I'll log off and go to another alt or back on one of my 80s. The few minutes I'm in looking for group might only be however long it takes me to take care of my auctions. I have alts in perfect range for instances such as RFK, the various SM branches, and Sunken Temple. They just need groups.

Looking for Raid should be interesting as well. I rarely pug a raid on my druid main, but my paladin is very pug-tolerant (DI goes a long way towards saving repair bills) and if people actually use the interface it would be nice for any 25-man pick-ups or 10-man alt runs. Of all my leveling alts I think only my feral druid has a chance to make it to 80 before Cataclysm, but still… it could potentially be a handy tool seeing as she's on a separate server without a guild.

I'm not sure how to handle the weekly raid quests though. My guild raids two nights a week; we're very casual. So would the weekly raid quests be integrated into our farm night, or would we not bother and just leave those open to pugging? I'm thinking we should do them as a guild, but travel time and such could get annoying. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime we have at least one more ToGC run tonight. Hopefully we can get down Faction Champs.